A novel battery thermal management system with air–liquid coupled cooling based on particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Effective heat dissipation in high-temperature is critical for maintaining the superior performance and power output of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for electric vehicles (EVs). Considering the low heat transfer efficiency of air cooling and the high energy loss of liquid cooling, a novel battery thermal management system (BTMS) coupled forced air cooling and liquid cooling was established. The thermal behaviors of absolute air-cooled, absolute liquid-cooled and air–liquid coupled cooled (ALCC) BTMS were compared at 2C discharge rate based on the thermal model verification of LIBs. Additionally, the effects of structure parameters of the ALCC plate on heat dissipation performance and energy loss were investigated using response surface methodology, and the structure was optimized using the particle swarm optimization. The results indicate that ALCC BTMS can achieve almost the same heat dissipation performance with only one-third of the energy loss of absolute liquid-cooled BTMS, and the optimized ALCC plate can reduce the maximum temperature by 1.0 %, the maximum temperature difference by 8.8 %, and the energy loss by 22.0 % at 2C discharge rate. Finally, the optimized ALCC plate is verified with the maximum transient error and the steady error between simulation and experiment within 5 %, which proves the effectiveness of the optimization.